Leaders at Transcend International discuss how an increasingly digital world presents unique opportunities– and serious obstacles– for social equity efforts. 

Episode Quotes

On current broadband access efforts

[14:29] Sarah: The federal government, local governments, you go to any state, they're all putting together digital equity coalitions and they're looking at state broadband initiatives.

We've got $45 to $65 billion coming down in infrastructure, with a bunch of that earmarked for broadband internet access. So– how can we get in front of that, and put the playbook together and fill in those gaps so that we can best equip communities and individuals to go out and advocate for themselves and to take control of that infrastructure?

On the long-term nature of the work

[20:03] Sarah: We're making investments in projects that we expect to take a long time to solve because they're massive, complex issues, and it's going it take some time to iterate and ideate. But that's where we're going to start. We're going to start to quantify impact on communities and to engage with the communities, and coalition-build.

On community meetings in Detroit

[21:17] Steve: The passionate description came from a gentleman who lives in a community where they suffered a 45 day outage in the heart of the pandemic, and just a street over had full service. 

Different community, different socioeconomic status, different decisions being made.